Robert Frost Quotes on Writing
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A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words.
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Everything written is as good as it is dramatic. It need not declare itself in form, but it is drama or nothing.
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When I see young men doing so wonderfully well in athletics, I don't feel angry at them. I feel jealous of them. I wish that some of my boys in writing would do the same thing.... You must have form - performance. The thing itself is indescribable, but it is felt like athletic form. To have form, feel form in sports - and by analogy feel form in verse. One works and waits for form in both. As I said, the person who spends his time criticizing the play around him will never write poetry. He will write criticism.
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No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
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It is only a moment here and a moment there that the greatest writer has.
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Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes all the pressure off the second.
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I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.
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Sometimes I have my doubts of words altogether, and I ask myself what is the place of them. They are worse than nothing unless they do something; unless they amount to deeds, as in ultimatums or battle-cries. They must be flat and final like the show-down in poker, from which there is no appeal. My definition of poetry (if I were forced to give one) would be this: words that become deeds.
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[Style is] that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.